Contemporary usually means art made since the 1970s
Specialists generally treat contemporary art as work from the 1970s onward in a global, culturally mixed, tech-saturated field. English speakers confuse it with modern because the adjectives overlap; here contemporary means art of today. Nathalie Heinich calls modern and contemporary overlapping but distinct paradigms.
Heinich argues modern art challenges conventions of representation, while contemporary art challenges the artwork’s very status. Diversity of materials, forms, subjects, and even time frames replaces any single -ism. Break points once cited include World War II’s end and the 1960s; since then clean stylistic cuts are scarce. London’s Contemporary Art Society, set up in 1910 by Roger Fry and others to buy works for public museums, shows how the label slides forward: what it acquired then no longer counts as contemporary.
Definitions therefore disagree. Some reach back to about 1970, museums with ageing collections often prefer the safer pairing “Modern and Contemporary”, and some smaller galleries and magazines admit only work made since 2000. Long careers make the line awkward, and critics rarely like splitting one artist’s output into two eras.
Museums, private galleries, nonprofits, schools, and publishers regulate what counts, drawing criticism when outsider makers—literally working now—are excluded. Crafts such as textiles are also shut out despite big audiences; critic Peter Timms observed that a subversive ceramic about beauty fits the category better than a merely lovely pot. Public funders intertwine with commercial markets: a 2005 study found a handful of dealers representing the artists shown in Britain’s leading public museums, and corporations sponsor prizes and hang collections in lobbies. Britain’s 1990s saw contemporary artists enter tabloid culture.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 portrait of his partner Ross Laycock is a pile of wrapped sweets with an ideal weight of 175 pounds; visitors take pieces, so the work shrinks and can be refilled, tying participation to loss. Laycock died of AIDS-related complications in 1991 and the artist in 1996. The open question inherited from early twentieth-century doubt—what is art?—now plays out across installation and contested media rather than a single school style.
Source: Contemporary art
